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| Rule for Interpreting Commands and Prohibitions.
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Chapter 16.—Rule for Interpreting
Commands and Prohibitions.
24. If the sentence is one of
command, either forbidding a crime or vice, or enjoining an act of
prudence or benevolence, it is not figurative. If, however, it
seems to enjoin a crime or vice, or to forbid an act of prudence or
benevolence, it is figurative. “Except ye eat the flesh of the
Son of man,” says Christ, “and drink His blood, ye have no life
in you.”1867
This
seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure,
enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our
Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of
the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us.
Scripture says: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst,
give him drink;” and this is beyond doubt a command to do a
kindness. But in what follows, “for in so doing thou shall heap
coals of fire on his head,”1868
one would think a deed of
malevolence was enjoined. Do not doubt, then, that the expression
is figurative; and, while it is possible to interpret it in two
ways, one pointing to the doing of an injury, the other to a
display of superiority, let charity on the contrary call you back
to benevolence, and interpret the coals of fire as the burning
groans of penitence by which a man’s pride is cured who bewails
that he has been the enemy of one who came to his assistance in
distress. In the same way, when our Lord says, “He who loveth
his life shall lose it,”1869
we are not to think that He
forbids the prudence with which it is a man’s duty to care for
his life, but that He says in a figurative sense, “Let him lose
his life”—that is, let him destroy and lose that perverted and
unnatural use which he now makes of his life, and through which his
desires are fixed on temporal things so that he gives no heed to
eternal. It is written: “Give to the godly man, and help not
a sinner.”1870
The
latter clause of this sentence seems to forbid benevolence; for it
says, “help not a sinner.” Understand, therefore, that
“sinner” is put figuratively for sin, so that it is his sin you
are not to help.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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